Did the recent Doom open beta cause more harm than good? Feedback for the upcoming first person shooter has shown more of a negative kickback from the open beta audience last weekend, more than any other similar titles, and this may hurt sales.
Yes, we are all looking forward to the doom campaign more than anything and believe me, this is why I am so excited! But, seems as if doom may need to go back a couple of steps to rethink its arena style shooter portion of the game. It seemed to me that there was little very diverse about what was available, and I don’t just mean lack of content, because that’s a given in a BETA, but I mean that Doom feels, underwhelming. Certainly it has the look and feel down, but we’ve seen it all before. It just doesn’t feel like Doom. Doom is a fast pasted shooter, this multiplayer feels sluggish in ways and boring.
Now, the question I want to ask is, “do open BETA’s actually benefit new releases?”.
It seems more publishers are giving the go-ahead to releasing a small portioned open BETA to the public, thus creating a huge scale feedback to help make tweaks and improvements before release. Not only that, the companies are encouraging you to play the hell out of the selected game for a short period of time to hopefully make you excited about pre-ordering.
Now here’s where the problem lies for companies like Bethesda…..what we are seeing more than anything right now is a huge snowball effect of negative comments, which will undoubtedly hurt the release for any upcoming release choosing to take this path.
The problem for Doom taking this approach is that the single player must come first, which seems to be the case. However, creating all the hype around the multiplayer so much over the last several months has seemed to make us believe that the multiplayer is something worth stick around for after the campaign. They must release a solid multiplayer and show the public that this is not a single player with a multiplayer attached, but I fear that is not the case.
Hopefully id Software can make some much needed improvement, but it is unlikely in such a short period of time.
Doom is set to release May 13, 2016.
